Exploding Chinese Myths

...Peking's role as a center of world revolution "appears to have little reality outside the thinking of the present Chinese leadership and perhaps some youthful cult seekers among the quasi-intellectuals of the world," in the opinion of Franz Michael of George Washington University...

...Ho Chi Minh is more independent of China today than he was 10 years ago, and his stature as a revolutionary leader around the world, especially in Asia, is very great...

...Mao's chosen instrument for the Cultural Revolution, the young Red Guards, are being shipped out to the countryside as a form of exile...

...The experts differed in degree and nuance, of course, but their total effort presented a reasonably well-defined composite picture of present-day China...

...Thus, the military men were deemed more practical-minded and moderate than the wilder Maoists...

...China cannot escape this tradition...

...The principal beneficiaries of this move have been Japan, Hong Kong, Canada, Australia, and West Germany...

...Together with most of the conference participants, he contended that China's main interests are still domestic, particularly in the wake of Chairman Mao's effort to force rapid change in the traditional Chinese society...

...And the perception of a majority of China specialists rejects the Johnson Administration's portrayal of the Vietnam war as a pivotal stand against the spread of Peking-promoted revolutions to other countries...

...One sale amounting to S400 million took six weeks for two Canadians to negotiate and it has been renewed three times since...

...So far this fight, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, has put the People's Liberation Army in control and forced Chinese leaders to focus their attention on the chaos at home...

...Specifically, Kennedy recommended that the U.S...

...The U.S...

...Yet the first national convocation of Sinologists by the National Committee on United States-China Relations dispelled many durable illusions...

...Less dramatic evidence of Peking's sharp split with Moscow became apparent to American analysts a decade ago, when China began to shift the bulk of its world trade to non-Communist countries...

...and the Soviet Union may join together against the mainland, even in a direct military attack...

...All this extracurricular activity has cut down the combat capability of Chinese ground forces, said General Griffith, and the ability of China to project its conventional military power beyond immediate peripheral areas is limited...

...By 1975 or 1976, he estimated, China could have about 50 intercontinental ballistic missiles—an assumption Washington shares...

...Perhaps inevitably, the very nature of the Committee's activities brings forth vigorous suggestions for a new policy toward China—to replace the hardened posture that Washington developed back in the days when Peking was considered another satellite of Moscow...

...in Warsaw—the last remaining official link between the two countries—is taken as an indication that China (as President Nixon claims) is in no mood for friendly dialogue at this time...

...war in Vietnam is not a war with China," declared Klaus Mehnert, professor of political science at the Institute of Technology in Aachen, West Germany...

...Historically, China has been an inward-looking nation and not an expansionist nation...

...More impressive than the headline-winning speech, however, was the sheer weight of facts and informed interpretations provided by the professional China watchers at the two-day conference...

...Today the aggression greatly feared by some has never materialized," noted John K. Fairbank, the eminent China scholar at Harvard University...

...Theodore Sorenson, President Kennedy's special counsel, likewise proposed that the U.S...

...He observed that "Moscow's deeds have been more threatening than Peking's...

...Its major achievement, Eckstein concluded, has been to give the American public the false impression that we are hurting China...

...In many ways, indeed, these Washington legends appear as overblown as those propagated by Mao...

...The Army actually controls all Revolutionary Committees, which are the organs now responsible for administration of the government and for the maintenance of law and order...

...Harvard Professor James Thomson Jr., a former Far East adviser to McGeorge Bundy in the White House, readily acknowledges that he and others assume Peking's reaction to American overtures "now and perhaps for some time to come will be rejection and denunciation...

...Last month's combat along the Ussuri River frontier, threatening to overheat the long-simmering Sino-Soviet dispute, gave added urgency to Fairbank's suggestion that we "carefully avoid seeming to gang up with the USSR against China or with China against the USSR...

...He then hastens to add that the real objective of unilateral Washington moves lies beyond Chairman Mao and his colleagues...

...Although the Army loudly espouses the thoughts of Chairman Mao, it has acted during the Cultural Revolution to restore law and order by curbing the zealous Red Guards...

...Politically, it has been a symbol of America's attempt to isolate China...

...The Senate Democratic Whip proposed treating the nearly 20-year-old Communist regime "as Louis Kraar, who is spending this year at the Council on Foreign Relations, has recently returned to the U.S...

...The calm, clear logic of the specialists, in fact, made Mao Tse-tung's China almost scrutable and helped shrink the image of a menacing, reckless giant to more manageable proportions...

...As long as we fail to hold out such a clear alternative option—as long as we live up to Mao Tse-tung's image of us—we serve only the purposes of Mao Tse-tung, not our national interests or the interests of peace...

...Alexander Eckstein, director of the University of Michigan's Center for Chinese Studies, noted that the total U.S...

...China specialists, Thomson explains, are looking ahead to the near future and hoping to offer Mao's successors "the clear option, through our behavior as well as our words, of an alternative relationship with the United States...

...Mehnert argued that nationalism is the principal force resisting external influences in Southeast Asia, including those from China...

...While the mainland is "poor, underdeveloped and technically backward," Eckstein reported that its rate of economic growth over the past 17 years has been about 4.5 per cent—faster than that of India...

...Many China watchers doubted that Defense Minister Lin Piao, Mao's choice as successor, would be allowed to rule alone after the Chairman fades away...

...Purges have shattered the Communist party organization, and Mao's fellow leaders "have for some time lost faith in him...

...The Sino-American relationship "is a cancer in world relations that demands constant and careful attention," declared Edwin O. Rei-schauer of Harvard, former U.S...

...It is the underlying problem in attempting to define a desirable American stance in post-Vietnam Asia...

...Trade was also an important factor leading to the recent Canadian decision to seek full diplomatic relations with Peking, according to Chester Ronning, a veteran diplomat who served as Canada's charge d'affaires in Nanking...

...But Mao launched the campaign in late 1965 to rekindle the spirit of revolution that brought him to power, MacFarquhar explained, and to replace the increasingly pragmatic bureaucracy with successors more attuned to his radical ideology...

...The mit professor was speaking to 2,500 people crammed into an unlikely place for deflating Oriental myths, the gilded grand ballroom of the New York Hilton Hotel...

...THE SCIENCE OF SINOLOGY Exploding Chinese Myths By Louis Kraar Relations between the U.S.and China," observed Lu-cian W. Pye, "have been plagued with myths, and of course the problem with myths is that one man's illusion is another's reality...

...against a long-range missile attack from China...

...ambassador to Japan and chairman of the conference...

...The rewards of doing business with China are worthwhile, he asserted...

...The National Committee on U.S.China Relations calls itself a nonpartisan, independent, educational organization devoted to stimulating intelligent public discussion...

...He projected improved economic prospects after Mao departs, including an increase of the average Chinese annual income from the present $100 per person to about $120 in the next 10 years...

...The Army "has been injected into every aspect of Chinese life and Chinese society," according to Samuel B. Griffith, a retired Marine Corps brigadier general and an authority on China's military Establishment...

...But by then, the General figures, Peking "may be amenable to talking about nuclear arms control...

...The nation is in the midst of a struggle about the course to be followed after Mao (now 75) goes, about whether its 750 million relatively poor people should continue along the Maoist path if that means postponing economic betterment...

...By the standards of Western conventional wisdom, the Cultural Revolution looks like the disastrous last fling of a paranoid aging autocrat," said Roderick MacFarquhar of Columbia University...

...restore full diplomatic relations with the mainland, withdraw opposition to Peking's entry into the United Nations, drop trade and travel restrictions in favor of wide exchanges of people and ideas, and remove the token American military presence (but not protection against forcible takeover) from Taiwan...

...Not all the Sinologists at the Hilton, though, urged a headlong rush toward normalizing relations with China...

...Peking seems genuinely obsessed with the notion that the U.S...

...In the case of China, it is particularly difficult to gain a picture of reality...

...Canada's former Agriculture Minister, Alvin Hamilton, who negotiated substantial wheat sales to China, pointed out that the Chinese have expressed a willingness to "trade with anybody that will trade with them, even without [diplomatic] recognition...

...The lines of authority built up over the past two decades have broken down, Walker continued, leaving regional military leaders in a position of greater power...

...Even if all the present East Asian crises subside, Reischauer maintained, "the China problem will still be there, possibly looming larger than ever, as China develops its nuclear capacities and its other great potentialities...

...Perpetual revolution above concern with material development was his aim...

...The Armed Forces are now overseeing, if not actually operating, factories of all descriptions, mines, railroads, shipping, civil airlines, posts and telegraphs, schools and universities, the motion picture industry, radio, tv, the newspapers and even the Peking Opera...

...This view certainly contrasts with the ominous outlook recently presented to Congress by Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird, who maintained that Communist China "still constitutes the most dangerous potential for threatening peace...

...after five years in Asia...

...Moreover, Peking's cancellation of the recent scheduled session of talks with the U.S...

...Other Sinologists emphasized China's relatively small support—beyond verbal encouragement—for attempts to stir new revolutionary wars in Southeast Asia...

...While most leading Sinologists, both in the academic community and within government, have long advocated policies similar to Senator Kennedy's, their position is based on a continuing study and assessment of the mainland rather than mere sentiment and wishful thinking...

...and China: It "aggravates the whole unhappy Vietnam situation...

...But China scholars, seeking to understand a country with 2,000 years of experience at considering the rest of the world inferior outsiders, take a slightly longer view of the situation...

...a legitimate power in control of the mainland" rather than continuing the fiction that the Nationalists on Taiwan represent today's China...

...It also raises deep doubts about the value of developing an antiballistic missile (abm) system aimed partly at protecting the U.S...

...China's vision of the outside world—which may account for its long-range missile development— was said to be conditioned by its isolation and by a ring of American bases and alliances around its borders...

...The Chinese militant language and attitude were seen as compensation for the Middle Kingdom's basic weakness: China was not considered an expansionist power...

...Formed in June of 1966, it is financed by the Ford and Rockefeller foundations, plus contributions from blue-chip American corporations...

...Having played the Sino-Soviet dispute very wisely, "he is certainly no satellite of China...

...Franz Michael felt that the Soviet doctrine of limited sovereignty within the Socialist commonwealth "has raised the specter of Soviet intervention should the Chinese crisis deepen...

...Mainland China is clearly in disarray," reported Richard L. Walker of the University of South Carolina...

...embargo on all transactions with mainland China has had absolutely no economic effect...

...Like the physicians who deal most regularly with disease and become outspoken critics of cigarette smoking, most China specialists are pushing for an end to habitual hostility toward the largest nation in Asia, which contains a quarter of all mankind...

...Now that the Cultural Revolution is grinding to an apparent close, the indications are that Mao has produced far different results...

...Despite Peking's bellicose rhetoric about spreading revolutionary warfare and guerrilla fighting throughout the underdeveloped world, the specialists stressed that China's military capacity for adventures beyond its own periphery is limited and its actions are on the whole cautious...

...that the Soviets, not the Chinese, "are the chief suppliers of weapons used against our troops" in Vietnam...

...Nonetheless, there is a "conservative cast to Chinese policy," according to Chester Cooper, former special assistant to Ambassador Averell Harriman and currently a member of the Institute for Defense Analysis...

...At this stage, some are frankly puzzled about exactly who is in charge of the country and how long they might last...

...Not only has the aging Communist elite been withering away, but those who remain have seen their own unity irreparably fractured...

...Reischauer cited the ugly effects of the tension between the U.S...

...Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts put the meeting on newspaper front pages with his March 20 banquet speech urging a major—and immediate—overhaul of Washington's basic approach to Peking...

...It feeds the crisis in our relations with Japan, for most Japanese blame the United States for their own unsatisfactory relationship with China, and many are deeply fearful that the present security treaty they have with us may eventually involve Japan in war with China...

...Its 201 members represent a highly respectable cross section of representatives from business, labor, the academic community, and religious groups...

...treat the Soviets and Chinese on an equal basis...